Most of what’s said about using social media to promote your brand boils down to this bit of unhelpful advice: You have to use it. That may be true, but it leaves you with little more than trial and error to guide your social media marketing efforts.

While there will always yet another platform everyone says you must use, one shows promise in actually simplifying and enhancing your social media outreach.  It’s called Storify and companies big and small are already using it to skip the pitch and publish their own stories using their best curated content.

What is Storify?

Social media is supposed to boost your brand building and customer engagement efforts, but the actual results are diffuse and still difficult to measure. It’s one thing to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, FourSquare and Pinterest, and quite another to create an integrated campaign that is effective across each unique platform.  Storify helps you do just that.

From the user dashboard within Storify you can gather all the content that you have already generated in the press and on other social media sites into one window. From there you can select the best tweets, comments, photos and videos, plus links to PR news stories you’ve generated in traditional media, and package them into a single post.  Think of it as designing the front-page layout of a newspaper: you put the best stuff front and center, highlight noteworthy pieces and entice readers to dig deeper.

Become Your Own Publisher

Storify’s own slogan is “Don’t get lost in the noise.” Rather than spewing a fire hose flood onto the Web and seeing what sticks, Storify lets you bring together a multitude of voices into one targeted story.  And you can publish as many stories as you like. Use it to support your current marketing strategy, respond to up-to-the-minute trends, or bundle the most useful information on a newly released product.

The best part of publishing with Storify? Your audience becomes your distributor.  Storify was built for the lay person, so it’s accessible to everyone and it’s optimized for sharing across the Web.  That means when you create a story it doesn’t only exist on the Storify site; it can be posted to Facebook, tweeted, emailed, and blogged about all with a single link.

Is Storify Right for Healthcare Providers?

Storify is an excellent way to promote medical services and devices. You may have heard the expression, “If you don’t control your image, someone else will.” This is particularly true for the healthcare industry, which frequently has to combat misinformation and bring patients up to speed on medical and technological advancements.  Storify lets you decide what information is important and deliver it to patients in a clear and engaging format. Your message is less likely to get muddled by unrelated hashtags and pictures of cats

In a recent twitter discussion hosted by Healthcare Communications & Social Media (#hcsm), they invited doctors, patients, hospitals, and communications professionals to answer the question: “What motivates healthcare providers to use social media?” Once the discussion was over, one participant used Storify to publish the results. The participant archived the most relevant tweets in one easy-to-browse place so others could read it without having to comb the twitterverse.

The archived conversation is one of the most basic examples of what Storify can do. Hospitals and healthcare companies can get much more creative and produce a range of multi-media “stories” like:

• Case Studies: Pull in all the tweets, comments, blog posts, and photos you can find on a particular healthcare issue. Discover and highlight patients’ thoughts, questions, and needs to improve product marketing.
• Executive Profiles: Collect video interviews, Slideshare presentations, press releases, and tweets on company leaders.
• Product Launches: After the release of a new product, gather reviews, briefs, social media comments, press releases, and marketing content into one package. It can become a one-click patient, employee, and sales resource.

Storify returns some of the command social media has taken away by letting you curate the content to create the kind of story that gets shared.